The tech world’s lesson for newspapers, traditional media

When we see people lament the fall of newspaper and the problems in …

The New Yorker recently ran a characteristically loquacious essay about the decline of the newspaper and what it means for the future of journalism. The author, Eric Alterman, concludes that we're beginning an era of "superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism." Alterman claims that the blogosphere and other web-based news outlets largely lives parasitically on the traditional news media, relying on the latter to do original reporting, which web-based publications can then link to and comment on.

The future is now... in the tech scene

This seems like a rather myopic view. Journalism in the future will be different, to be sure, and the changes may be disorienting to those who are used to the old ways of doing things. But there are good reasons to think that, if anything, reporting in the future will be considerably better than it was in the past. You can get a good sense for where journalism is headed by looking at the world of tech reporting, which tends to be a step ahead of the rest of the media. Most geeks have been getting tech news from sites like Slashdot and Ars Technica for a decade or longer, and aggregators like Digg and Techmeme are used more heavily among techies than in the rest of the news media. We've long since passed the point where most of the best tech journalism appears online. So there's a good chance that today's tech news trends are a foretaste of what's ahead for the broader media world.

One way to get a sense for the state of tech journalism is to look at Techmeme's leaderboard, which gives a rough idea of the sites that get the most links and discussion in the tech blogosphere. Only one of top ten sites—the New York Times—is a mainstream media outlet. The other nine are native web-based publications, either blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOm or news sites like CNet and Ars Technica. Looking further down the list, we see a smattering of mainstream media outlets—the AP and Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC—but the majority of sites are still web-based. While some of these sites certainly link to mainstream media outlets on a regular basis, virtually all of them do original reporting or analysis as well. Indeed, it has become common for important technology stories to be broken first by a blog or other tech web site and then get picked up by mainstream media sources afterwards.

Experts, journos, and depth

Alterman suggests that web-based publications can't match the depth of knowledge and expertise that professional journalists bring to the job. But in the technology field, the opposite is often true. If you'll forgive us for tooting our own horn, Ars Technica is a good example of the ways a new business model can improve the depth of news coverage. Ars began life when Ken Fisher, already with several years of IT experience, became dissatisfied with the tech reporting online. When Ken considered who he wanted to reach out to in order to start the site, he went not for the best writers or journalists, but for his friends and associates with the technical chops.

As a result, Ken and the other early contributors leveraged their knowledge of the technology world into reporting that had greater depth and sophistication than most of what you could find in the mainstream media. For example, Jon Stokes' comprehensive write-ups of various chip architectures are unlike anything you'll find in the mainstream media. As Ars has grown, it has leveraged the same basic approach to other areas of the site. The regular contributors to Nobel Intent, for example, include several freelancers with day jobs in the scientific fields they cover, and they all hold PhDs. This gives them a level of insight and sophistication that would be difficult for a professional journalist to match. Ars is now large enough to have several full-time reporters doing work that's quite similar to what a mainstream reporter would do. But it would be impossible to achieve the same combination of breadth and depth without recruiting contributors from a variety of different backgrounds.

The same pattern can be seen around the technology world. Mike Arrington and his merry band of writers at TechCrunch regularly scoop mainstream media outlets with stories about the startup world. Mike Masnick at Techdirt (where I'm also a regular contributor) has been covering the technology world daily for a decade and knows the beat as well as anyone at any dead-tree publication. Wired (which has a magazine but is increasingly a web-focused organization) and CNet have top-notch reporters and bloggers that do work that compares favorably to the work of reporters on the tech beat at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And there are hundreds of blogs like Groklaw and Freedom to Tinker that cover specific aspects of the technology world in greater depth than a mainstream newspaper could hope to do. In short, a mix of traditional journalists and expert amateurs can often produce better results than either of them acting alone.

Better, not worse

Looking at the broader media world, it's true that the majority of high-quality journalism still happens in traditional mainstream media outlets. It would surprising if this were not the case, since they still control a majority of eyeballs and advertising dollars. But the idea that the web is, or is likely to become, a journalistic wasteland doesn't make a lot of sense. As the reader attention—and with it, advertising dollars—shift to the web, web-based publications (along with those mainstream publications that successfully navigate the transition to the web) will have the resources to recruit the best journalists to work for them. High-quality reporting draws eyeballs, and eyeballs generate advertising revenue, so talented writers will continue to be in demand regardless of the medium.

One of the big challenges that mainstream media outlets will face is that their size and bureaucracy makes it difficult for them to experiment with new news gathering techniques. As we've seen here at Ars, one of the big advantages of web-based publishing is that it's possible to draw on contributions from a broader range of professional writers, bloggers, and amateurs with subject matter expertise. Large, monolithic news organizations, which rely on full-time employees for the bulk of their writing, may have difficulty exploiting this model. If a natural disaster occurs, for example, a news organization that flies a professional reporter to the scene of the tragedy will likely get scooped by a news organization that has an existing network of freelancers in the area who can cover the story without leaving their home towns. What those writers lose in writing skills they are likely to make up in timeliness and depth of local knowledge.

Mastering new styles of reporting, and discovering new ways of organizing the reporting process to ensure a minimal level of quality, will require a lot of experimentation. Looking back a couple of decades from now, journalists will no doubt marvel at the crudeness of the work now being done by the Huffington Post (and Ars Technica). It may be true that in the future we'll have fewer people whose official title is "journalist." But that doesn't prove that the reading and viewing public will be less-informed about the world around them. To the contrary, as we come to more fully understand the capabilities of new communications technologies, we will almost certainly see big improvements in the depth, responsiveness, and diversity of journalism.

The new media world will be different, to be sure, and will probably require the reader to do a bit more work to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it would be awfully hard to argue that tech journalism is in worse shape today than it was a decade ago, and there's every reason to think the transition to the web will be just as healthy for the enterprise of news gathering more generally.

Further Reading

Matt Yglesias at the Atlanticargues that the decline of the newspaper is nothing to lose sleep over.

Oh no!

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.